Springsteen Protects His New CD's Online in an Old-Fashioned Way

By CHRIS NELSON

Published: July 15, 2002

While the music industry scrambles to keep albums off the Internet before they reach stores, one highly successful artist has managed to skirt online piracy with a surprisingly low-technology solution.

The artist, Bruce Springsteen -- who has released six CD's of material in the Internet era, with another album on the way this month -- has thwarted prerelease file-sharers not through digital protection or online policing, but with an old-fashioned lock-and-key approach. In the weeks before a release, his albums barely see the light of day, frustrating not only downloaders but even music critics and other industry insiders who cannot put their hands on his work.

On July 30, Mr. Springsteen will introduce ''The Rising,'' his much-awaited first studio album with the E Street Band since 1984, on Columbia Records. But even as Mr. Springsteen's camp plans extensive promotions, from premieres of different songs on America Online to a live appearance on ''Today'' from Asbury Park, N.J., few people outside his inner circle have heard the album.

Recording labels usually ship dozens or hundreds of albums to radio stations, journalists and others involved in the industry months before they go on sale. Mr. Springsteen's organization, on the other hand, sent out fewer than 10 copies as of early July, and only a handful more will join them 14 days ahead of the store date -- if at all, according to a spokeswoman, Marilyn Laverty of Shore Fire Media. Insiders who do obtain advance copies do not distribute them, said Gary Graff, a music journalist at Reuters who has interviewed Mr. Springsteen on several occasions. He said no one wanted to anger the Springsteen camp. ''That's almost the best weapon they have,'' he added.

Mr. Springsteen's success battling online piracy is an outgrowth of his longtime fight for strict control of his work, which has seen him battling bootleggers in court both at home and abroad.

As a result, Mr. Springsteen's prerelease work has been conspicuously absent online. In 1998, he issued the four-CD set ''Tracks''; last year, he released the double album ''Live In New York City.'' None of those complete discs were available online before they were available in stores. Indeed, no more than a handful, if that, of the 84 songs on those sets were distributed ahead of time.

By contrast, a scan of the WinMX file-trading network last week turned up complete or nearly complete albums by Linkin Park and Filter, which are not scheduled for release before the end of the month.

Though Mr. Springsteen's core audience is older than most Linkin Park fans, his catalog is still popular -- and once his albums are released, they are as easily traded online as those of any other artist.

While his approach clearly prevents his work's being swapped before release, how it affects sales is unclear. Take the case of the rapper Eminem. His latest album, ''The Eminem Show,'' was scheduled to be in stores on June 4. But in the weeks leading up the release, the disc was already available in MP3 form on file-sharing networks like Kazaa. Afraid of losing sales, Interscope Records took the extremely rare step of bumping up the release to a Sunday, May 26, rather than the usual Tuesday release.

And when SoundScan released its figures for the week ended May 26, ''The Eminem Show'' had sold nearly 285,000 copies, and the disc had shot to No. 1 on Billboard magazine's albums chart.

''Within less than a month, he had the biggest-selling album of the year,'' said Geoff Mayfield, Billboard's director of charts. ''So if he did lose sales to people copying the album before it was released in stores, he still wrapped up some pretty significant numbers since it came out. It's hard to say how much damage it did to that album.''

Some music executives think prerelease exposure could actually be beneficial. ''If you're trying to have a hit song and really have a phenomenon, the momentum of huge word-of-mouth and media exposure may be worth creating or risking a leak,'' said Danny Goldberg, former chief executive for the Mercury and Warner Brothers labels and current chief of the independent Artemis Records.

And for someone like the 52-year-old Mr. Springsteen, who has more fans near his own age than his children's, prerelease distribution might actually help him generate sales with a younger demographic.

''The Springsteen crowd now, if you wanted to reach them, then you do it at Starbucks and the supermarket,'' Mr. Graff said. ''Young people, you put it where they spend their time, which is online.''

Stacey Herron, music analyst for Jupiter Research, said she thought Mr. Springsteen might sell more albums to younger listeners if he reached them through file-sharing. But Mr. Springsteen is not going quite that far with his arrangement with America Online that allows him to reach the digital set while still maintaining a modicum of control.

AOL is introducing four songs from ''The Rising'' over four weeks before July 30, but those songs are being streamed, not posted for downloading.

Still, it can be difficult to keep the reins tight in cyberspace, even for Mr. Springsteen. A week before the second promotional track was released, an enterprising fan uncovered the file on AOL by guessing its likely name. Within two hours, the song had been converted to an MP3 and distributed.

Ms. Laverty would not comment on the AOL promotion, nor would Mr. Springsteen's managers and representatives of Columbia, a unit of Sony.

An AOL Music spokeswoman, Ann Burkart, said she was unaware of the advance distribution of the second promotional song, ''Lonesome Day.'' But she did add that the promotion's first single, ''The Rising,'' was streamed 755,000 times in 48 hours, putting it among the five most popular songs of AOL's Listen First campaign since it was begun earlier this year.

Photo: The CD cover of ''The Rising,'' Bruce Springsteen's new studio album with the E Street Band.